OK, so at 150W per channel, the H160 is no slouch, but no one really expected the outcome, least of all Anders Ertzeid, Hegel’s VP of Marketing and Sales. The H160 creamed the H300 not quite to embarrassing levels, but certainly to the point where it was obvious the newer, smaller amplifier was very clearly the better performer. Anders later confided in us that he’d played this same H160 tacked onto a pair of big Magicos (creating in the process an über-mullet system where the loudspeakers cost almost 15x the price of the amplifier) and it just sang sweetly. Hegel pulled out all the stops on the H160, especially on the digital side. The amp is exceptionally richly configured for digital audio, with a coaxial, three optical, one USB, and an Ethernet input, the latter fully UPnP and DLNA-chummy. And, if you connect the Ethernet port to your wireless router, it can be used as an AirPlay device. OK, so it’s more a DAC/dumb terminal than a media player, server, or renderer (in that it can only be used to play tracks sent to it, rather than actively search or access them). However, I feel this is a refreshing change from DACs that try, and mostly fail, to be a kind of network streaming device. All this being said, some kind of on-board wireless connection would be useful. It’s probably a good plan to think of the built-in converter as basically Hegel’s HD11, with an Ethernet link. It’s the same 32-bit AKM DAC-chip architecture, capable of 24/192 precision on all bar the USB, and 24/96 on that input. It’s not an asynchronous USB input, because Hegel prefers adaptive. Hegel also prefers a linear phase output, and deploys its patented LineDriver high current, low impedance circuit block to limit the ingress of high-frequency digital noise elsewhere in the circuit. The amplifier section itself is a 2x 150W into eight ohm design which near doubles to 250W into four ohms. Hegel, however, doesn’t just make off-the-peg circuits that ape those of hundreds of other amp manufacturers this is more back to the drawing board. Hegel, as in all its amps, keeps the current and voltage gain stages completely separate through the amplifier circuit (even to the point of feeding these stages from different power supplies) in an attempt to deliver higher dynamic range and lower distortion. Also, although the amplifier is notionally a Class AB design, its ‘SoundEngine’ local, adaptive feed-forward circuit gives the amplifier effective error cancellation instead of error correction, and sonically combines the ‘purity’ of Class A with the high damping factor of Class AB, which once again aims to lower distortion while raising dynamic range. Both of these characteristics took a good couple of hundred hours to come to light, with the amp sounding a little rough-edged and uninspiring before that. Once suitably conditioned, this is one of the least ‘sounding’ amplifiers I’ve heard in a long time. The Hegel does this not in a colourless, bloodless manner, but rather with the kind of intrinsic ‘rightness’ that should be inherent to all amplifiers in theory, but usually fails to appear in the real world. Describing the H160’s performance in terms of musical presentations is a little pointless, because you might as well read a review of the recording itself, the amp adds and subtracts so little from the mix.
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